Social Enterprise for the Visually Impaired: Voices from Within

Despite the importance of empowerment as a key intervention tool used by work-integrated social enterprises (WISEs) to improve the well-being of beneficiaries, little research in SE has taken an ‘emic’ (or insider) approach to understand the voices of the beneficiaries – how they perceive themselves and others as the recipients of empowerment and what they seek to achieve as the subjects of empowerment. To explore this “beneficiary voice” gap, I presented and analyzed a rare case pertaining to a visually impaired person who has been empowered by Dialogue in the Dark, a WISE in Hong Kong, and uncovered issues surrounding the stigmatization, lack of job opportunities, immobility, and fear among the visually impaired groups, and how WISE can do better to assist them and create an inclusive society. The case enriches and extends SE research by revealing opportunities to apply stigma theory, lead user theory, and stakeholder-embeddedness theory to advance research, practice and policy making in SE.